Antonia Quirke - Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers

She's right about one thing of course, but it doesn't feel like Puccini.

To me it felt more like this:

Jeremy Irons says I've been waiting for you and Patricia Hodge says What do you mean? They're in a bedroom upstairs in a smart house; music is thudding below. I knew you'd come he says, and she says I've just come in to comb my hair . He says I knew you'd have to comb your hair. I knew you'd have to get away from the party.

He's drunk but he looks like he means it. She laughs – he's her husband's best friend and there is absolutely nothing whatsoever about her which suggests that flirtation or infidelity has ever crossed her mind. So when she asks Aren't you enjoying the party? and walks amusedly to the dressing table to pick up her hairbrush, she is just humouring an old friend, no more, no less. He just comes out with it. You're beautiful. Listen. I've been watching you all night. I must tell you, I want to tell you. You're incredible .

You're drunk.

Nevertheless. Irons delivers this word beautifully. It is a beautiful word to say, after all. I was best man at your wedding. I saw you in white. I watched you glide by in white .

I wasn't in white.

I should have had you in your white before the wedding. I should have blackened you in your white wedding dress, blackened you in your bridal dress before ushering you into your wedding as your best man …

She looks headmistressily unbothered by the situation. My husband's best man, your best friend's best man .

Irons ignores this. You're lovely! I'm crazy about you. All these words I'm saying – don't you see they've never been said before? Can't you see? I'm crazy about you. It's a whirlwind. Have you ever been to the Sahara Desert? Listen to me. It's true. Listen. You overwhelm me, you're so lovely.

I'm not!

You're so beautiful – look at the way you look at me!

Patricia Hodge gives us this woman's easy talent for coping with such situations. Fending off this kind of approach, we see, has always been one of her more instinctive accomplishments. I'm not looking at you! She is kind but stern.

Look at the way you're looking at me! I can't wait for you. I'm bowled over. I'm totally knocked out. My jewel. He puts his hand near her hair as though it's radiating heat. This isn't a pitch or a line, although I have seen several actors play this speech of Pinter's as just that. Nor is it a drunken error, as Douglas Hodge had it at the National Theatre in 1998: Hodge is supposed to be good in Pinter but he never plays against Pinter, which is what Irons is doing, rather than nudging us in the ribs to tip us off to what the author really thinks of these avowals. You could do this scene so many ways. But for Jeremy Irons, no editorialising, no standing apart. This is actually happening. The actual magic. It's magic.

I can't ever sleep again. Now, listen! It's the truth! I won't walk! I'll be a cripple, I'll descend – I'll diminish into total paralysis. My life is in your hands, that's what you're banishing me to – a state of catatonia. Do you know the state of catatonia? Do you? A state where the reigning prince is the prince of emptiness, the prince of absence, the prince of desolation. I love you . She makes some footling objection, looking as pale as Patricia Hodge has ever looked. You want to reach into the scene and pinch her cheek, raise the blood to the surface. I adore you. I'm madly in love with you. I can't believe that what anyone at this moment is saying has ever happened. HAS EVER HAPPENED. Nothing has ever happened. NOTHING. This is the ONLY thing that has ever happened. Your eyes kill me. I'm lost. You're lost.

No she says. But her brain is beginning to register depths of feeling which have been slumbering under her marriage for years, for fifteen years, which this man has disinterred for her.

Yes.

Well, that's Pinter. The film is the backwards-running Betrayal (1982) and this, the final scene, is the start of the story, a trick which the last decade has become rather addicted to copying. It's one of the greatest love scenes ever filmed because it does something which you almost never see. This is where, if you don't have a script like Pinter's, you have to cut away (to bedroom or breakfast) but here we actually witness the woman falling in love with the man, and you can see it because you can see Irons hypnotising himself, enchanting himself. You can see the actual magic.

Of course Irons has this quality of doomed romanticism – there is in his face something tending towards sickness and his teeth look a little brown – which makes him perfect for old-fashioned romantic parts. His best bit in Brideshead Revisited was being dumped by Julia Flyte, sitting on the stairs, embodying the pain of love: I don't want to make it easier for you. I hope your heart may break. In The French Lieutenant's Woman (another Pinter script, which I've always cherished for presenting the actor's life as an idyll, with Irons and Meryl Streep both playing actors, lounging around on beds doing the crossword and at garden parties in the sunny 1980s) he says to Streep: Why did you leave Exeter? You told me you loved me; you showed me your love. Answer me! Are you saying that you never loved me? You must say, ‘I am totally evil, I used him as an instrument, I do not care that in all this time he hasn't seen a woman to compare with me! That his life has been a desert without me. That he has sacrificed everything for me!’ Say it! In Damage he gets damaged by Juliette Binoche. And naturally Betrayal ends unhappily. They should sell a three-disc DVD box-set of these sad stories called The Jeremy Irons Grief Trilogy. I'd buy it.

The thing is, I just can't take my eyes off Irons's face in any of them. And I mean that literally. I just can't take my eyes off him. There is a quality of mesmeric handsomeness in certain actors which simplifies the experience of movie-going to the point where the aesthetic pleasures of bone-structure photographed over an hour or so are enough entirely to satisfy you. And it's a kind of acting available – among a multitude of hunks and dreamboats – only to a tiny minority of the shockingly beautiful. Faces so beautiful that you get a tension between the idea of a movie being a story and it being moving portraiture. It's weird – your appetite for looking at these faces seems never to be sated. Were Last Tango in Paris twelve hours long I'd still be shovelling Brando's face into my eyes. How can we tear ourselves away?

Into this category put: David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) – a good example since it is one's riveted gaze on Bowie's indescribable beauty alone which holds a somewhat bitty film together. Christopher Walken in everything. Billy Crudup in All the Pretty Horses, a face somewhere between the young Sinatra's and Montgomery Clift's. Rupert Everett in Another Country, handsomeness raised to an almost comical level. Bruce Robinson in Truffaut's The Story of Adele H. (1975). Paul Newman in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, fighting against it. Rutger Hauer in Bladerunner, looking like a sane Klaus Kinski. I can look at Hauer for hours, unable to believe that nature has done something so complicated as a face and made so few mistakes. That throughout the whole delicate process it hasn't made a single error.